ABSTRACT
All political parties saw school reform not as an isolated, technical issue, but as a contest, in microcosm, over the structure of German society itself. The Socialists and their allies in the Democratic Party regarded the establishment of a uniform public school system as an essential phase of Germany’s transformation into a society of free men and women. School reform took many different directions and enjoyed varying degrees of success. For contemporary partisans of school reform, the measure of success was doubtless the fate of the denominational schools. The number of children of school-age in the Kassel district slipped from 172,619 in 1911 to 169,674 in 1921 and then fell drastically to 128,125 in 1926. In 1882 an agreement between the Kassel administration and the consistory of the Protestant Landeskirche in the district noted the receipt of “numerous requests from among teaching circles for an end to the obligatory lower church duties.”
